Antonio Gramsci (
IPA&_160;
['gram?i]) (
January 22,
1891 –
April 27,
1937) was an Italian
philosopher, writer,
politician and
political theorist. A founding member and onetime leader of the
Communist Party of Italy, he was imprisoned by
Benito Mussolini's
Fascist regime. His writings are heavily concerned with the analysis of culture and political leadership and he is notable as a highly original thinker within the
Marxist tradition. He is renowned for his concept of
cultural hegemony as a means of maintaining the state in a
capitalist society.
Gramsci was born in Ales, Italy, on the island of Sardinia. He was the fourth of seven sons of Francesco Gramsci, a low-level official. He was of Albanian descent, his father's family was Arbëreshë and the family name was related to Gramsh, an Albanian town. Francesco's financial difficulties and troubles with the police forced the family to move about through several villages in Sardinia until they finally settled in Ghilarza.
In 1898 Francesco was convicted of embezzlement, unjustly it turned out, and imprisoned, reducing his family to destitution and forcing the young Antonio to abandon his schooling and work at various casual jobs until his father's release in 1904. The boy suffered from health problems a malformation of the spine owing to a childhood accident left him hunch-backed and underdeveloped, while he was also plagued by various internal disorders throughout his life.
Gramsci completed secondary school in Cagliari, where he lodged with his elder brother Gennaro, a former soldier whose time on the mainland had made him a militant socialist. However, Gramsci's sympathies at the time did not lie with socialism, but rather with the grievances of impoverished Sardinian peasants and miners, who saw their neglect as a result of the privileges enjoyed by the rapidly industrialising North and who tended to turn to Sardinian nationalism as a response.
